The Peculiar Truth about Ringo’s Son of Dracula

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The Peculiar Truth

3 min readDec 12, 2023

This is Part 2 of 2 about singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson and his connection to the Beatles. Click here to read Part 1.

Pop musician Harry Nilsson was called by some the American Beatle. Lennon and McCartney praised his albums, and he hung out with the Beatles in the final years the group remained together and after the breakup.
1972: Ringo Starr played drums on Nilsson’s eighth studio album Son of Schmilsson, which featured cover art showing Harry Nilsson dressed as a vampire.
Apple Corps was the Beatles’ multimedia company involved in producing music and films. Ringo spearheaded a few of its movies.
When Ringo came to him with the idea of making a filmed musical called Son of Dracula, Nilsson assumed Ringo had taken inspiration from Son of Schmilsson with its vampire cover art. But in reality Ringo never made the connection. It was all a coincidence. Nilsson agreed to not only appear in the movie but to play the title role — despite never having acted before.
Six Nilsson songs were integrated into the film. All but one were recordings from his previously released albums.
Son of Dracula (not to be confused with the 1943 Lon Chaney movie of the same name) was billed as the “first rock-and-roll Dracula movie.” It ran 90 minutes in length, and Ringo Starr was credited as the sole producer. He also had a major acting role.
The plot: The only son of the deceased Count Dracula arrives in 1970s London to be crowned King of the Netherworld. His name is Count Downe (Harry Nilsson). He’s a vampire but born of a mortal mother. His friend Merlin the Magician (Ringo in long white hair and beard, robes, and pointy hat) and Baron Frankenstein (British actor Freddie Jones) anticipate the Count’s arrival and prepare his coronation. The Count then wanders London and enters a nightclub where he jams onstage with a rock band for some inexplicable reason. Later he visits his accommodations where the Count finds a piano and performs Remember (Christmas), which had previously appeared on the album Son of Schmilsson. Count Downe is torn between ruling the Netherworld and becoming mortal. Only Baron Frankenstein can perform the radiation surgery that can make Count Downe a human. First, though, he meets Amber, a mortal who becomes the movie’s love interest and the motivation for the Count’s transformation. At the coronation chamber, which has ghouls, mummies, and werewolves, the Count performs Nilsson’s Jump Into the Fire. (Keith Moon drums in the background.) Then that transitions into the tune Daybreak, a calypso pop confection that’s the only original track in the film. In the climactic surgery scene, Nilsson’s hit song Without You plays while the Count and Amber lay unconscious on gurneys during his transition into a mortal. Then Count Downe tells his minions that he cannot be their overlord. When the ghouls revolt, sunlight kills them all. And in a surprise twist, Amber was an unwitting plant employed to seduce the Count, get him to go mortal, and destroy the Netherworld. All of it orchestrated by Merlin.
Why Dracula’s son spoke with an American accent was never explained. But everything about the movie was utterly illogical anyway.
The preposterous plot was never played for comedy. The film wasn’t laughably inept like an Ed Wood cult classic or campy like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Neither was it suspenseful or bloody like the Hammer Dracula films of the era. The acting was actually fairly commendable. Even Harry Nilsson wasn’t half bad as an actor. But the storyline was terrible.
The film couldn’t find a distributor for two years. Ringo hired writers, including Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, to punch up new dialogue, which was dubbed in. That didn’t help. As Ringo later said, the additional edits made “even less sense.”
After Son of Dracula was finally released in 1974, it was promptly forgotten.
A remastered full version of Son of Dracula can be viewed on YouTube.